ABSTRACT
On Sunday 17 July 2005, a major art happening took place in Newcastleupon-Tyne that opened up a space for thought and reection about photography, community, and their intimate relationship with each other as discourses of exposure. This event brought the New York-based photographer and installation artist Spencer Tunick to the new BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art accompanied by a cast of seventeen hundred photographic subjects in order to stage another round of ‘getting naked’ and documenting it in the name of public art and the temporary site-specic installation. The press release for this event promised a lot to potential participants of the photo shoot, most of whom are barely recognizable in the photographic prints that resulted from the installation. ‘Those involved will be immortalized by participating nude in a series of installations taking place on 17 July’ (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 2005).1 The punctual and puncturing rhetoric of photography and its intimate relationship to temporality – with death, mortality, and nitude – have been repressed and glossed over in favour of the seductive promise of becoming immortalized in and through the work of art. By invoking immortality, the potential volunteer is promised something usually associated with the fame and celebrity of the unique individual whereas Tunick’s photographs, usually teeming with masses of esh, yield nothing if not a staring into the face of anonymity.
